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âExactly Where I Was I Could not Tellâ: Panopticism, Imageability and the Gothic City
Urban Gothic and panopticism
At the beginning of Richard Marshâs 1897 bestseller The Beetle: A Mystery, the novelâs first narrator Robert Holt seeks a nightâs shelter at the casual ward of Hammersmith Workhouse in suburban west London. Unemployed and starving, Holt turns to the last resort of the Victorian destitute, an institution reviled by many nineteenth-century social commentators as dehumanising in its prison-like routine. Yet, as Holt soon finds out, even the workhouse will not accommodate him: the door is slammed in his face, he flees an ensuing altercation, takes the first turning and soon loses himself in the suburban wilderness sprouting up around Hammersmith until, stumbling through a mist that represents a mixture of rain and fog, he finally feels that he has left the civilised world behind him. Somewhere in the environs of Walham Green, an expanding lower-middle-class suburb south of Hammersmith, Holt pauses for a momentâs rest, spies the inviting open window of a detached villa and enters burglariously, falling into the clutches of the novelâs eponymous foreign monster under whose watchful eyes he will soon tramp around London at astounding speed, never losing his way, until finally expiring in a squalid East End lodging house.
The Beetle is the best known of Marshâs series of urban Gothic novels, all produced at the very turn of the century. Like The Goddess: A Demon (1900) and The Joss: A Reversion (1901), it is a reverse-colonisation or âinvasion Gothicâ narrative in which a monstrous foreign presence invades contemporary London, a city increasingly unknowable due to its size and diversity, and attacks or entraps vulnerable and economically marginal British characters representative of urban modernity.1 In The Beetle, Holtâs narrative is followed by an attack on the politician Paul Lessingham, who has in his youth offended the forces of Isis in Cairo. An avenger from the cult, whose appearance shifts between an old man, a young woman and a monstrous beetle, abducts Lessinghamâs fiancĂŠe, the outspoken New Woman Marjorie Lindon, who is destined for human sacrifice. Lessingham, the gentleman-inventor Sydney Atherton and the aristocratic private detective Augustus Champnell chase the monster through London until a fatal train crash, discussed in the next chapter, apparently destroys it. In The Goddess, the narrator John Ferguson dreams that his friend Edwin Lawrence is attacked by a laughing female fiend, only to wake up to find a beautiful, mysterious and amnesiac woman covered in blood stepping into his room through the window. The following morning, a torn and mutilated corpse is discovered in Lawrenceâs rooms. The mentally unstable Lawrence has fallen under the influence of the âGoddessâ, an Indian sacrificial idol, who has cajoled him into committing a series of crimes, including the murder of his moralising brother, Philip. The novel concludes with Lawrenceâs suicide at the hands of the Goddess and Fergusonâs marriage to his nocturnal visitor. The Joss, finally, recounts how the impecunious shopgirls Pollie Blyth and Emily Purvis are unfairly dismissed by their employer and only saved from homelessness by the unexpected news that Pollie has inherited a house and an annuity from her long-lost uncle, Benjamin Batters. The strongly fortified but rat-infested house contains its secrets, however, and is besieged by bloodthirsty Chinese characters. Batters is in fact in hiding inside the house, attempting to escape a Chinese tribe who have mutilated him into a joss, an Oriental idol, and showered him with riches, also concealed within the house. The novel concludes with the death of the monstrous Joss. While Battersâs mutilated body appears grotesque and hardly human, the âreversionâ of the novelâs title ironically comments on the Jossâs âbackslidingâ from a god to a mere Englishman.
All three novels are set in a contemporary London that could be seen as a central character in itself. A number of critics agree that the modern city was perhaps the most typical locus of fin-de-siècle Gothic, replacing, as Fred Botting notes, the medieval, Mediterranean settings of earlier Gothic by bringing together âthe natural and architectural components of Gothic grandeur and wildness, its dark, labyrinthine streets suggesting the violence and menace of Gothic castle and forestâ.2 Glennis Byron similarly observes that London âwas the key site of 1890s Gothic monstrosityâ, âexud[ing] a sinister sense of ⌠desolation and menaceâ, and for Kelly Hurley, âLondon â both the labyrinthine city itself and its anonymous-seeming suburbs â is envisioned as a dark, threatening mysteryâ in modernist Gothic.3 Notably, the city streets take on the function of the Gothic labyrinth, âa site of darkness, horror and desireâ that is âassociated with fear, confusion and alienationâ.4
Fin-de-siècle Gothic shares a discursive context with a national debate over the perception of London as a divided city. This debate centred on âOutcast Londonâ â Londonâs poor, alienated and often criminal slums, particularly the East End â and addressed questions related to abject poverty, slum housing, sexual health and morality, mass immigration into already overcrowded quarters, and the perceived linkage between urban poverty, crime and social disorder in the aftermath of the 1887 Trafalgar Square riots and the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders. At the same time, as Judith Walkowitz notes, the cityscape of the wealthy West End of London was undergoing âconsiderable renovationâ as âa modern landscape ⌠of office buildings, shops, department stores, museums, opera, concert halls, music halls, restaurants, and hotelsâ was created to serve the changing needs of emergent figures such as female white-collar workers and consumers increasingly visible within this ânew commercial landscapeâ.5 Surrounding London on all sides, suburbia was rapidly devouring the countryside and altering the topography of the city.
As Walkowitz posits, fin-de-siècle London was portrayed in contemporary writings, both fictional and factual, as âa city of contrasts, a class and geographically divided metropolisâ âwhose social boundaries were regularly transgressed by illicit acts of sex and crimeâ.6 Raymond Williams notes that the notion of the divided city âbecame generally available as an interpretative imageâ at the fin-de-siècle, when Londonâs social and geographical faultlines âdeepened and became more inescapably visibleâ and the trope of Darkest London, an ââunknownâ and âunexploredââ East End, âbecame quite central in literature and social thoughtâ.7 Walkowitz importantly reminds us that this âimaginary urban landscapeâ of âthe metropolis as a dark, powerful, and seductive labyrinthâ was a literary and cultural construct that was âconveyed to many reading publics through high and low literary formsâ and has subsequently informed the literary and historical imagination.8 In the aftermath of the Ripper murders, the East End district of Whitechapel acquired unprecedented notoriety as âan immoral landscape of light and darkness, a nether region of illicit sex and crime, both exciting and dangerousâ.9 As Seth Koven notes, the district became something of a tourist attraction so that â[b]y the 1890s, London guidebooks such as Baedekerâs not only directed visitors to shops, theatres, monuments, and churches, but also mapped excursions to ⌠notorious slum districts such as Whitechapel and Shoreditchâ.10 A two-way relationship exists between this imaginary landscaping and the Gothic mode: the construct of the East End as a dangerous but seductive labyrinth is essentially Gothic, while the sensational appeal of outcast London seeped through to the cityscapes of the urban Gothic fictions of the period.
Some of this flux was articulated by the late-Victorian social explorers â investigative journalists, early sociologists, socialist reformers and Christian missionaries who followed the established literary tradition of gentlemanly ventures into the slums of the East End for purposes of reportage, reform and the less reputable, voyeuristic practice of âslummingâ. The work of such writers as George Sims, Arthur Osborne Jay, William Booth and Jack London attempted to locate, describe and categorise Londonâs pockets of poverty, vice and foreign influences in a strikingly vivid vocabulary. For them, the city was sharply divided into a wealthy but ignorant west, slumbering in its own complacency and unaware of the threat posed by a labyrinthine, unknowable and alien east, best characterised as a hell or an underworld, a whirlpool or a vortex. Yet the most visual of these representations, Charles Boothâs multi-volume study Life and Labour of the People in London (1889â1902), challenged the sharp geographical division of London into a wealthy west and a poor east by supporting a sociological analysis of Londonâs class structure with a set of colour-coded maps that painstakingly measured the perceived relative wealth of each street.11 Boothâs maps provided a strikingly visual account of the geographic positioning of poverty and potential crime in London, but also challenged the focus of many of his contemporaries on the East End by showing an alarming proximity between wealth, represented by sunny golden yellow, and squalor, conveyed in racially charged black, throughout the imperial metropolis.12 By turning a corner in a wealthy area, one could enter a street of the worst kind.
The social explorersâ calls for the mapping of Londonâs unknown spaces bear a close resemblance to Michel Foucaultâs analysis of the âdisciplinary mechanismâ that ensures that âeach individual is constantly located, examined and distributedâ in social space in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), his classic study of surveillance and social control in modern society.13 While Foucaultâs most powerful example of such a mechanism is Jeremy Benthamâs model prison the Panopticon, an âenclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervisedâ by âan omnipresent and omniscient powerâ, he also gives âthe utopia of the perfectly governed cityâ as an example of the âpanoptic mechanismâ, âvisible and unverifiableâ, in action.14 Foucault argues that the disciplinary institutions of the nineteenth century â âthe psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the hospitalâ â treated social deviants â âbeggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderlyâ â by branding and classifying on the one hand, by spatial exclusion and containment on the other.15 Perfect visibility is essential to the âdisciplinary societyâ because âa state of conscious and permanent visibility ⌠assures the automatic functioning of powerâ, the problematically anonymous, sinister social forces that in Foucaultâs scheme attempt to control the individual through self-regulation.16 The panoptic mechanism, Foucault argues, is âan anti-nomadic techniqueâ because âdiscipline fixesâ and âarrests or regulates movementsâ.17 âOur society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillanceâ, Foucault concludes.18
As Robert T. Tally notes, literary cartography often combines examples of âthe real places of the geographical globe and the imaginary places of [the authorâs] own fictional universeâ.19 Marshâs urban Gothic novels are set within a recognisably contemporary, partly mappable London. Yet the novelsâ cityscapes are also uncannily strange and disorientating so that characters (and readers) soon lose their way and find themselves unable to identify their bearings with confidence. This tension between what Kevin Lynch calls an âimageableâ city â an urban environment easy to navigate â and a Gothic city that resists exact mapping and panoptic control is characteristic not only of Marshâs urban Gothic but also of other contemporary discourses sited in the troubled space of fin-de-siècle London, such as the writings of the urban explorers who attempted to locate Londonâs pockets of poverty and crime.20 In the three novels, the âârealâ material worldâ of fin-de-siècle London meets Marshâs ââimaginedâ representations of spatialityâ, merging into what Edward Soja characterises as a fuzzy, disorientating âreal-and-imaginedâ cityscape.21 The spaces of the city resist the investigative efforts of the novelsâ protagonists, detective figures and reader-geographers, while suggesting that only the novelsâ eponymous monsters, inhabiting the liminal âreal-and-imaginedâ space, are able to master the city. Marshâs urban Gothic thus functions as a counter-narrative to modernityâs attempts to control and police the troubled space of the imperial metropolis with its deviant inhabitants.
âSome sort of acquaintanceâ: the imageable city
The work of the urban geographer Kevin Lynch offers one way of reading the pedestrianâs navigation of the cityscape. In The Image of the City (1960), Lynchâs focus was on âthe apparent clarity or âlegibilityâ of the cityscapeâ, âthe ease with which its parts can be recognized and can be organized into a coherent patternâ, and he argues that âa legible city would be one whose districts or landmarks or pathways are easily identifiable and are easily grouped into an over-all patternâ.22 For Lynch, âa distinctive and legible environmentâ contributes to a positive urban experience by promoting feelings of âsecurityâ and âindividual growthâ.23 Urban planners attempting to create successful cities should therefore pay attention to the question of legibility or, as Lynch also terms it, âimageability: that quality in a physical object which gives it a high probability of evoking a strong image ⌠that shape, color, or arrangement which facilitates the making of vividly identified, powerfully structured, highly useful mental images of the environmentâ.24
Lynch studied the ways in which people find their way around a city, noting that âway-findingâ, the ability to â [s]tructu...